November Poetry Monday: Mihaela Moscaliuc

POETRY MONDAY: November 1, 2010

Mihaela Moscaliuc

I can’t say enough good things about Mihaela Moscialuc and the rich, lyrical, folkloric poems in her first collection, Father Dirt, which received the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books. Although I’ve known Mihaela and her poetry for a few years, what I hadn’t realized is that she had begun writing only a few years earlier. She was born and raised in Romania, where she worked with Roma children in an orphanage and also did work with the homeless. She learned English in her home country, came to the U.S. for graduate school and, most remarkably, when she began writing poetry, did so directly in English. What she has said of this is, “Filtering my Romanian life through the English language has added a layer of difficulty but also a sense of relief …. Life makes sense differently in English.”

Mihaela now lives in New Jersey with her husband, the poet Michael Waters (whose fine work you have seen in these pages) and their young son
and teaches at Monmouth University and in the MFA Program in Poetry and the Art of Translation at Drew University. Her poems, articles, reviews and translations have appeared in many literary journals, and she was also co-translator of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time (Red Dragonfly Press, 2003).

Although it was difficult to choose just a few of her many fine poems, the three below, included with permission of Alice James Books, will give you a brief introduction to the quality and tenor of her work.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

EVERYTHING TOUCHED BY DARKNESS KNOWS ITSELF

When Mitică, street-child-blessed-with-lightning-fists,
as he dubs himself, allows the seven layers off,
his eyes turn into desert sand. Taut-winged scarecrow,
he begs forgiveness for letting his body undergo
such mock baptism, then steps into the bathtub.

When I daub his shoulders with olive soap,
he prays for my “bleached soul” in quiet tones,
asking that in the name of Father Dirt
I be granted absolution until my tongue
learns the texture of rubble, the taste of clay.

CUL-DE-SAC

“There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out” –Dysart (Equus, Peter Shaffer)

Last afternoon, I saw a teenage boy
naked in the wooded valley beside our house.
My son, on my left hip, making horsy sounds.
The boy’s upright back shone among pines.
He was kneeling on a couverture of needles
buckled with early crocuses. I kissed my son’s temple,
kept walking, but his soft woof
made me look again. The boy’s buttocks,
taut—a dancer’s in mid-fouetté—
and before him, barely visible
next to the neighbor’s weathered tool shed,
a dog. The dog still—stilled—and I turned my back
to the quiet woods, stumbled across scruffy lawn,
waited behind the bedroom window.
They emerged from the valley, boy and dog,
the hooded kid who dribbles the ball cul-de-sac
to cul-de-sac late afternoons, mute lab
always at his side—and I thought of Brindi,
the mutt raped for weeks by two of my street children.
They’d stormed into the office, placed the bundle
on my desk: blood soaking the sweatshirts
in which they’d wrapped her. She didn’t lift her head.
The boys’ bare chests all scabs and scratches—no goosebumps,
though snow winds barbed our windows.
This is the only favor we’ll ever ask, we swear.
They kissed her neck and ears, turned around,
then added from the threshold:
When she heals we want her back.
Behind the window, my son hammered my hip.

71-YEAR-OLD COUPLE DESCENDING INTO THE BLACK SEA
“After a decade of struggling to outlive the legacy of communism,
famished, moneyless, desolate, they join the escalating list of suiciders.”
—Romanian newspaper, May 4, 2000

One speaks first and the other listens.
Neither mentions distant daughters kneeling to kiss
the sleepy eyes of children. They share a ladle of fish soup
as the moon blasts into fullness, as sand swells with dew.

Wedding bands secured with duct tape,
twined shoes stuffed with rusted scale weights
saddling stooped frames like scuffed boxing gloves,
they descend into the sea, holding hands, without song, without prayer.

How the water must prepare to receive them —
its slow embrace as furrowed skins
bouy away from fluted bone
above the ossuary of the sea.